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When the government awards energy companies the rights to drill for offshore oil and gas, it’s supposed to make sure the American public, which owns the resources, doesn’t get screwed. The government is required by law to use “competitive bidding” and to ensure that taxpayers receive “fair market value.”
However, decades of data suggest that the government has been falling down on the job, a Project On Government Oversight analysis found.
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Read coverage of our analysis:
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The Interior Department has a history of letting energy companies have their cake and eat it, too—by issuing drilling rights at liquidation-sale prices and cutting companies a break on royalties.
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New data indicates enforcement of environmental laws is slowing dramatically under the Trump Administration, and that’s even before budget cuts threatened by the White House become reality.
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A $156 million Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) contract with the Georgia-based consulting firm Tribute Contracting LLC was terminated “for cause,” having only delivered 50 thousand of the required 30 million meals.
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The Air Force is seeking $2.3 billion in 2019 to continue development of the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, up from $2 billion this year. But, as was the case during the B-2’s development, the Pentagon has steadfastly declined to detail how that money will be spent.
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POGO in the News
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Since so few members of Congress today have served in the military, they’re unable or unwilling to challenge the institution, said Mark Thompson, a longtime Pentagon reporter now at the Project on Government Oversight. “These folks don’t know the military, and, more importantly, they are cowed by the military,” he said. “They have a glint of guilt, and tend to give the military what it wants without a hard scrubbing. The military knows this, and it’s laughing all the way to the Treasury.”
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Ethics experts like Scott H. Amey, who clearly didn’t get the memo that the Brothers Trump are to be praised for the sacrifices they’ve made leaving all sorts of money on the table, are apparently unmoved. “The president should be putting the public’s interest before his business interests. That can’t happen if his son is flying around the world trying to trade on the fact that his father is sitting in the Oval Office,” Amey, general counsel for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight in Washington, told the Associated Press. He added that a number of the foreign deals being promoted by Trump’s large adult sons have “stretched the definition of what ventures were previously in the works.”
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OSC took action after the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight objected to DOE's posters last year.
POGO raised concerns about the DOE signs displaying an American flag melting into a puddle of binary code, an image first made public in an E&E News story last summer (Greenwire, Aug. 9, 2017). The posters, notably, were tied to an Obama-era program focused on protecting classified information and unrelated to the Trump administration's focus on leaks from within the government.
POGO warned that employees who didn't understand the nuances of the whistleblower protection laws could be inadvertently deterred from reporting wrongdoing. The group also said the posters could chill "legitimate whistle blowing because it fails to provide information about whistleblower rights, or distinguish between leaks of classified information and disclosures of unclassified government wrongdoing."
Special counsel Henry Kerner in a statement thanked POGO for its "valuable public service" and helping OSC fulfill its mission. "OSC is grateful for watchdog groups such as POGO that are vigilant about whistleblower protection and bring incidents that could undermine whistleblowing to our attention," he said.
POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian said she was glad to see his group's recommendations regarding the placement of the posters and their "inappropriate and noncompliant wording" led to their removal.
"Even more so, I am encouraged by the legal message that this removal will send to Energy Department employees, and by the explicit policies that OSC has laid out for all federal agencies in these memos," she said in a statement. "Whistleblowers are the nation's first line of defense against waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality within the federal government, and when they are adequately protected, their disclosures can lead to important reforms."
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The Christian Science Monitor
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“I don’t know how it is going to work for Mueller, whether his findings are going to be embraced as legitimate or not,” says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington. “I used to be able to say, look at all the facts and you can see if they are persuasive or not. But now people don’t see that as an essential part of being persuasive.”
Partisan bickering on Capitol Hill has largely replaced serious congressional oversight, Ms. Brian says.
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“This program is deeply troubled,” said Dan Grazier, a senior military fellow with the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group. “This program was deeply flawed from the very beginning. There were some really bad assumptions that were made, and some really bad decisions that were made before the contract was even awarded.”
The biggest knock against the F-35 program is that it violated a sacrosanct acquisition axiom: “fly before you buy.”
[...]“Finally and most importantly, the program will likely deliver Block 3F [full war fighting software] to the field with shortfalls in capabilities the F-35 needs in combat against current threats,” Behler wrote in his annual report.
“That says this program is not going to deliver on all of the capabilities that were promised to the American people,” argued POGO’s Grazier.
The planes being deployed now are “really expensive prototypes,” he said. “It’s not verified that this design is actually combat-capable.”
[...] “Part of the justification of cutting shorter the production of the F-22 was, 'Hey, we have the F-35 coming up right behind it.' Well, we don’t have the next aircraft coming up right behind the F-35, so pushing forward with the F-35, unfortunately, is the only option we have at the moment,” Grazier said.
The program, he says, is just too big to fail. “They kind of baked in an inevitability to this, because we have invested so much time and money into this whole process.”
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The news caught the attention of the nonprofit watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, which was concerned the posters violated “whistleblower” laws that allow government employees to report waste, fraud, and abuse. So the watchdog group in mid-August asked the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency protecting government workers, to look into it, and the agency quickly opened an investigation.
[...] The watchdog group has claimed the removal of the posters and the distribution of new guidance to agencies as a victory.The investigation also resulted in two updated policies for government agencies beyond the DOE, according to the letter. One emphasized that monitoring employee email and other communications should “not interfere with or chill lawful disclosures.” The second one noted that non-disclosure policies, forms, and agreements must include certain language about legal whistleblowing. The Energy Department posters did not have such language.
“I am glad to see that POGO’s recommendations regarding the placement of these posters and their inappropriate and noncompliant wording has led directly to their removal,” Danielle Brian, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.
[...] This isn’t the first time agencies under Trump have left out language about an employee’s legal right to blow the whistle in certain documents and communications, Elizabeth Hempowicz, director of public policy at POGO, told BuzzFeed News. “This issue has flared up a bit more in the last year,” she said.
For example, Customs and Border Protection issued a communication document to the Army Corps of Engineers that also lacked key whistleblower language, according to a November complaint the watchdog organization sent to the Office of Special Counsel. “We know there’s an investigator working on it currently,” Hempowicz said. And the group filed a third complaint, this one about a Department of Justice memo, just this week.
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An OIG spokesperson declined to detail the cost of these investigations, citing their ongoing nature. The travel audit appears to be the most demanding. OIG investigators will have to obtain and audit of hundreds of receipts for Pruitt, his many aides, and his security detail. Staff must then determine whether EPA travel policies were followed for each individual on every trip. That’s a lot of work, said Peter Tyler, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight. “This looks like a full-on audit to be written by the IG himself,” said Tyler, who used to work in the inspector general’s office of the Department of Health and Human Services. “It seems legitimate for them to say, I’m setting a priority, and only looking at 2017.”
[...] Limited budgets often force inspectors general to choose between investigating an agency’s spending or evaluating the effectiveness of its programs. The EPA’s mission, for instance, is to protect human health from pollutants. “The EPA is dealing with life and death issues,” Tyler said. “Are kids still dying of lead poisoning even with EPA lead programs? That’s a question OIG could answer.
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By law, the government is supposed to get “fair market value” for leasing offshore tracts of oil and gas. But the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog group, found that companies rarely compete for leases.
As a result, the federal government got less than 3 percent per acre in its most recent lease sales, in August of last year, than it did before 1983, a new POGO analysis found. The findings suggest that for years the government has gotten short-changed when it comes to oil and gas lease sales. As the Trump administration tries to expand offshore drilling, the problem may only get worse.
At least one government auditor, the Congressional Budget Office, generally concurs with POGO’s findings. Returning to the tract nomination system would raise federal income by $150 million over 10 years, the CBO found in 2016.
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Current bidding and leasing procedures fail to capture "fair market value" on offshore tracts, according to a report out today from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). Interior's "dysfunctional system" has existed for years, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, said David Hilzenrath, chief investigative reporter for POGO. But the federal government's offshore leasing methodologies are ripe for a redo under President Trump, who "promised to bring dealmaking acumen" to the executive branch, Hilzenrath said.
[...] "With the Trump administration planning to open immense stretches of ocean floor to oil and gas companies, the stakes are rising," the POGO report says.
[...] A key step toward maximizing that revenue may be to re-evaluate BOEM's approach to leasing, POGO found.
More than 75 percent of leases BOEM has awarded in the Gulf of Mexico over the past 20 years attracted only a single bid, POGO determined from its analysis of Interior data on 13,212 high bids since 1997.
"Far from fostering real competition for drilling rights, the system in place since the Reagan administration has delivered little more than an illusion of competition," the report says. "In this Alice-in-Wonderland version of an auction house, the low bid generally wins, because the low bid and the high bid are typically one and the same — the only bid."
Interior classified nearly 80 percent of those tracts as nonviable and did not conduct a full analysis of their value, POGO found. The majority of those — 68.7 percent — eventually produced energy, the analysis shows.
"One way to look at this picture: The government consistently got more money than it thought the tracts were worth," the report says. "Another way of looking at it: The government consistently underestimated the market.
"Either way, the numbers beg the question: How much more could the government have gotten if it set higher expectations or ran more competitive auctions?"
POGO crafted a list of 11 recommendations for the federal government. The top two address tract viability. The group also recommended that the Trump administration hold targeted lease sales, rather than areawide auctions.
"[I]f vast new areas were opened to drilling, as the Trump administration has proposed, an incremental approach to leasing would allow the government to learn from drilling results and gather information over time about oil and gas deposits in those areas," POGO wrote as part of one recommendation.
"Otherwise, the government risks parting with crown jewels before it has any inkling of their true value," POGO said.
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The Make It Safe Coalition, which includes the Government Accountability Project, Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen and Union of Concerned Scientists, also called out Sessions’ new policy.
“When an agency unlawfully gags its employees, it threatens Congress’ ability to engage in oversight and hampers citizens’ rights to know about waste, fraud, abuse and threats to the public’s health, safety and liberty,” the coalition wrote in its own letter to Kerner.
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“Government scientists need to understand that they are protected by the same laws as other federal employees and can blow the whistle on censorship of science that creates a specific and substantial risk to health and safety,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which also helped write the recommendations.
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myStatesman (Austin American-Statesman)
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“The problem is that a lot of people haven’t understood the implication of these proposals,” said Jake Laperruque, staff attorney with the Project on Government Oversight. “They are very sweeping and can affect immigrants and citizens very broadly.”
For instance, he said, proposed legislation that details the surveillance effort doesn’t adequately define where drones that potentially will be equipped with powerful facial recognition technology can fly or whether they can capture data on U.S. citizens. “They don’t specify if they can only record the border itself or the entire 100-mile border zone,” he said, referring to the area U.S. law allows the Border Patrol to operate without a warrant. “There are no limits on that, no oversight.”
[...] A version of their legislation has been endorsed by Trump, but suffered a 60-39 defeat in the Senate this month during failed negotiations on an immigration and border security bill. Laperruque of the Project on Government Oversight said senators from both parties had issues with the bill’s surveillance powers.
[...] “These are extremely powerful tools that can be abused,” Laperruque said. “Leaving it up to them to decide how far to take it is not a great idea.”
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